A User's Guide to the Millennium, page 17
On this reading, the conspicuous display of the peacock is precisely that – a deliberately blatant advertisement of its abundant wealth, power and confidence, the avian equivalent of the gold Rolex, the Ferrari and the Armani jacket. Mere sex, as every blonde nestling into the leopard-skin upholstery has always known, is an incidental matter, and in its wisdom the gene pool agrees, seeing to it that the sexual act takes place for more enduring and socially valuable reasons than physical attractiveness.
In her racy and provocative way, Dr Cronin tells a story that sums up the essence of neo-Darwinism. Two hunters are being chased by a bear. One stops to change into his running shoes. ‘They won’t help you to out-run the bear,’ his companion points out. ‘No,’ replies the first, ‘but they’ll help me to out-run you.’ Genes which favour such cunning will survive, and the same logic underpins acts of altruism. The cause of the gene pool as a whole may be advanced if a few genes are present which trigger socially useful acts of self-sacrifice. So the neutered worker ant toils selflessly, and heroes throw themselves on to hand-grenades to save their fellows. Their own strength and courage will not be passed on to a future generation, but this is offset by the advantages to those who survive.
Part detective story and part philosophical enquiry, The Ant and the Peacock offers a paradox in every paragraph, its arguments made more convincing, I happily admit, by the author’s beauty – usually one would never dare to make this comment, fearing charges of sexism and flagrant irrelevance, but perhaps the gene pool in its cunning is at work again, steering her book towards a reviewer susceptible to a pretty knee and graceful wrist.
But why, I wonder? Theories of evolution are themselves subject to evolutionary pressure, from the ‘survival of the fittest’ Darwinism of the Victorian free-enterprise heyday, to the now discredited Lamarckism of the bogus Soviet biologist Lysenko – who claimed that strains of Siberian wheat, in the best socialist fashion, could learn to improve themselves in their own lifetimes and pass on these acquired characteristics to the next generation – and last of all today’s evolutionary theorists in our more devious and calculating times, casting a neutral eye on altruism and self-interest.
Is the new Darwinism about to bring us an unsettling message, and has the gene pool guessed that it might be most swiftly delivered by the prettiest messenger? Whatever the message is, I suspect that it is nothing to do with beauty.
Daily Telegraph
1992
Electrodynamics and Womanizing
Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics
James Gleick
What is it about theoretical physics, one of the most abstract of all human activities, that attracts the eccentric and nonconformist? For all I know, geologists and bio-chemists are equally odd, but the great physicists of the twentieth century do seem to constitute a pantheon of the peculiar, as if the intense effort of wrestling with the secrets of the universe has revealed bizarre strains in their personalities.
One thinks of Einstein, with his wild hair and lack of socks, shirtless under his pullover, the epitome of the absent-minded professor. Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel Prize-winning creator of wave mechanics, was driven by a powerful Lolita complex and must have been a menace to colleagues with pubescent daughters. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the A-bomb project at Los Alamos, was a self-torturing neurotic who flirted with the far left and claimed that a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita — ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ – crossed his mind as he gazed at the first atomic explosion in New Mexico. Did it really? It seems just the sort of thing a novelist would invent.
Every bit their equal in eccentricity was Richard Feynman, the American Nobel Prizewinner whom many consider the century’s greatest physicist after Einstein. Apart from his wartime years at Los Alamos, Feynman spent his entire career within the American university system. But away from the laboratory he led a life that resembled the more louche roles of Jack Nicholson – player of bongo drums, safe-cracker, lover of strip clubs and habitué of brothels, a compulsive womanizer who had devised a strategy for picking up women in bars, sadly not described by James Gleick in this entertaining biography. I would have settled for fewer pages on electrodynamics and more on the dynamics of nature’s other great mystery, the female heart.
Television viewers in 1986 may remember Feynman as a member of the presidential commission on the Space Shuttle disaster. After days of testimony and stonewalling, Feynman cut straight to the source of the tragedy when he immersed a piece of flexible O-ring, a vital fuel-tank seal, in a jug of iced water and demonstrated that it became non-elastic, with the catastrophic results that occurred after a freezing night at the launch pad. This ability to tackle any problem in the most direct and simple way, ignoring the accumulated mass of conventional opinion, had inspired Feynman since his earliest days. He was born in 1918 to working-class Jewish parents in Far Rockaway, Long Island, part of the urban area surrounding New York that has produced the world’s largest concentration of Nobel Prizewinners. The impoverished immigrants from Eastern Europe brought with them a deep respect for learning, and saw science as the greatest career open to a poor and determined child. After graduating from MIT, where his brilliance was instantly recognized, Feynman was summoned by Oppenheimer to Los Alamos, and soon became the enfant terrible of the bomb project. Sadly, his young wife had contracted TB, and after years of illness died in a nursing home in Albuquerque, only months before the wonder-drug streptomycin that would have saved her became available.
At Cornell University after the war Feynman continued the work which led to his Nobel Prize, remaking the theory of quantum electrodynamics and inventing the Feynman diagrams that are now part of every physicist’s basic tool-kit. Like many scientists whose greatest work is over by their thirties, Feynman felt increasingly unfulfilled as he entered middle age. Fortunately, on a beach beside Lake Geneva in 1958, he saw an attractive young Englishwoman in a blue bikini, a costume that had yet to appear in the United States. Another kind of fusion reaction occurred, and Feynman invited this highly independent young woman to join him at Caltech, where she first worked as his housekeeper and later married him. By all accounts, the genius whom C. P. Snow termed a cross between Einstein and Groucho Marx had at last met his match.
Daily Telegraph
1993
The Thousand Wounds and Flowers
The Voices of Time
edited by J. T. Frazer
If an Einstein Memorial Time Centre is ever founded, it should take its first premises in the Museum of Modern Art. The hidden perspectives hinted at in the paintings of Picasso and Braque, not to mention the time-saturated images of the surrealists, say more about the subject than anything the natural sciences can offer, for the clear reason that the sciences are not equipped to deal with the metaphor. The thousand wounds and flowers opened in our sides every day irrigate themselves from a very different watershed.
Given this virtually total handicap, the collection of essays edited by J. T. Frazer is interesting chiefly for its marginal information. The bulk of this book is concerned, not with time, but with duration, succession, the ‘representation’ of events, coexistence and the like, topics that soon float adrift on the verbal level, if they ever had any existence at all on any other. Enough glosses on Heraclitus, Parmenides, Newton, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Kant, Bergson and William James are provided to pump the British Museum Library into the world’s largest hot air balloon, although in other senses the book has a certain charm, like an imaginary Borges story about a history of histories of time. Charm, though, is probably too light a word to use – this book may not have depth but it undoubtedly has width. Laid side by side, the tongues of its garrulous authors would pave all the roads to Babel. Nevertheless, they raise a number of interesting questions.
1 To take a literary example, why do so many of Shakespeare’s heroes exhibit signs of ‘narrative delay’; Hamlet notably, Macbeth and Lear (both archetypical ward bosses presumably well educated in the realpoli-tik of when to put the knife in or back out gracefully), even Caesar and Prospero, world-weary intellectuals not notably tolerant of fools? The great majority of Shakespeare’s heroes show all the signs of immaturity rather than psychopathology, but it seems to me that the ‘time delay’ device may well reflect some subtle dislocation of one’s normal processes of recognition and action during situations of extreme danger or hazard, like the suspended time of Warhol’s ‘Death and Disaster’ series – a deliberate holding of the camera frame for the purposes of one’s own conceptual understanding. At times of crisis or bereavement one may well ‘hold’ events in the camera of one’s mind in order to grasp the totality of the situation.
2 At London’s Charing Cross Hospital, and a number of other enlightened maternity homes, the father is present at his wife’s delivery, an extraordinary experience, by any standards, of the new-born child’s remarkable age; lying between his mother’s legs, older than pharaoh, older in fact than the great majority of his so-called biological contemporaries. From where does this sense of time come, like the sense of space one feels while looking at the Milky Way?
3 The time-values contained in the paintings of Tanguy, Delvaux and Chirico. The geometry of a landscape seems to create its own systems of time, which cinematize the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the twentieth century is the ‘Mona Lisa’, just as the greatest novel is Gray’s Anatomy.
4 Are there reasons to believe that our apprehension of the future is intimately associated with the origins of human speech, and that the imaginary reconstruction of events necessary for our recognition of the past is also linked with the invention of language?
In the Korsakov Syndrome, as a result of organic brain disturbance, memories fall out of place and there is no comprehension of succession and duration. Disturbance in chronology is often a first symptom of an oncoming psychotic phase. Schizophrenics may either deny the existence of time (on the basis of their infantile delusions of omnipotence), or deny that they lived at all before the onset of their psychosis. Compulsion neurotics stick to a tyrannical inner schedule out of a fear of real time. Déjà vu may be prompted by forbidden infantile wishes of which the possessor has become subliminally aware. In serious brain disturbances there can be extreme feelings of confusion which stem from the inability to ‘file’ daily events.
‘Time does not exist for those who are absolutely without anxiety’ – Kierkegaard. A melancholy prescription for immortality.
Counting rhythms are increased by rises in temperature. Psilocybin or LSD not only raise the body temperature and thus produce an overes-timation of clock time, ‘clock contraction’, but a simultaneous expansion of space. The speed of nervous conduction is raised by three milliseconds for every degree Centigrade.
Certain patients with severe brain damage are unable to distinguish whether they are awake or dreaming.
New Worlds
1969
Spaced Out
The Next Ten Thousand Years
Adrian Berry
Science is still trying to catch up with science fiction. This ‘Vision of man’s future in the universe’ is not a book so much as a sound-track – a hymn of joy to the wonders of space travel and the super-technologies of the future, expressed in terms that, for decades, have been the stock-in-trade of science-fiction writers. Flying city states, artificial planets, faster-than-light drives through hyperspace, the redesigning of the Solar System, and the colonization of the furthest reaches of the universe – most of these ideas, long since exhausted by s-f writers, are now being put forward seriously by reputable scientists.
Professor Freeman J. Dyson, for example, Fellow of the Royal Society and a past chairman of the Federation of American Scientists, is the architect of a project known as ‘The Dyson Sphere’, which involves dismantling the planet Jupiter and reassembling the pieces in a huge sphere around the Sun, in order to exploit its entire radiation. What is interesting is not the project itself, but the repeated insistence that it is entirely feasible ‘even in terms of today’s technological knowledge’. The perfect scheme to take Concorde’s place.
In many ways, it is refreshing to see someone champion these grandiose if dotty ideas with so much enthusiasm, and the book as a whole, with its old-fashioned confidence in scientific and technological progress, has a stately period charm, like a chromium-plated replica of the Berengaria. The author approvingly quotes Dr Edward Teller’s sly remark about the Friends of the Earth: ‘Perhaps the Earth has too many friends and the energy-user too few’; and nowhere does he express any anxiety about the possible hazards of ever-increasing economic and population growth. Even a catastrophe such as a global nuclear war would, he maintains, only delay progress briefly, not prevent it. To obtain the limitless energy sources that will be needed for the exploding populations of the next few thousand years, mankind will inevitably move out into deep space, he argues, and begin the serious business of redesigning the Solar System and, ultimately, the whole Milky Way, around its own needs.
The Moon, seen primarily as a paradise for the vacuum scientist, will become a vast factory floor. Mars, lacking warmth and water, has few charms, but Venus, a hot biochemical mix, is ripe for colonization. The chapter ‘Making it rain in hell’ describes how its atmosphere of water vapour and carbon dioxide will be bombarded by immense numbers of rockets filled with oxygen-producing algae. After this will come wholesale ‘terra-forming’ – planet-sculpting, that is, literally remodelling other worlds in the image of our own – and the construction of artificial planets, variously named New London and New New York, which will sail outwards across the galaxy, leaving behind a darkening sea of stars each dimly burning within its own Dyson Sphere … If I were a Martian, I’d start running now.
All this is done with vigour and panache, an impressive handling of concepts, ergs and light-years. Many of the ideas are breath-taking, to say the least, and the author is certainly a change from all the professional doomsayers and airport thinkers hawking the latest eco-crisis. Yet somehow the book is not merely unconvincing, but irrelevant. Most of the events prophesied by Adrian Berry may well take place, but within what human context? The Next Ten Thousand years never seriously considers human, as opposed to scientific, evolution, and it seems obvious to me that our remote descendants will be as different from ourselves as we are from the weird algae, described by the author, which thrive on a diet of kerosene in jet-liner fuel tanks.
One value of science fiction is that its extrapolations, however farfetched, are tested within some kind of emotional and human framework. If one regards this book as a new kind of novel, part of a recently invented category of fiction that includes books such as Herman Kahn’s The Emerging Japanese Superstate and Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, it shows up the weaknesses of this new hybrid form.
At the same time, one could just as easily speculate that none of these predictions will come true, and probably with more evidence. The brief history of the manned space programme seems to bear this out. In a sense, as far as manned flights are concerned, one can say that the Space Age, far from lasting for hundreds if not thousands of years, is already over. Why were the majority of people not only bored by the manned space flights, but indifferent to them? Partly, I think, because the science-fiction writers had reached the Moon first and formed an invisible welcoming committee, somehow reminding us of Mort Sahl’s description of Cape Kennedy as Disneyland East. But most of all because, for the foreseeable future at any rate, space travel makes sense only in terms of those extravagant and overblown ideas, devoid of any human dimension, that fill Adrian Berry’s book. Trying to think more realistically about space, with its utter nothingness, we become a little like laboratory volunteers floating in sensory-deprivation tanks, deranged when the only perceptible external reality becomes the interior of our own minds.
New Society
1974
Manbotching
The Body in Question
Jonathan Miller
Arc books becoming another form of television? By rights, this lavishly illustrated survey of human physiology, ‘linked’, as the publishers say, to the new thirteen-part BBC series, should be reviewed by a television critic. Like Desmond Morris’s recent Manwatching, another interesting example of the transformation of the book into its electronic paradigm, The Body in Question seems designed not to be read so much as to serve as a reminder of happier hours spent in front of the tube.
Here are the familiar huge illustrations, many of them reassuringly the size of a television screen, the TV-style graphics, the sudden zooms on to any affecting image – the constant favourite of these books is the suckling infant. The disconnected flow of images, from a full-colour reproduction of Verrocchio’s ‘Baptism of Christ’ to a news-agency photograph of a music-hall faith-healer, makes complete sense to a viewer trained to appreciate the presentation techniques of Civilisation and World in Action, and further creates the uncanny impression that one is not really reading a book but watching a programme. Recently, while being shown round an imposingly furnished lounge in one of the smarter Thames Valley housing estates, I actually heard the hostess apologize for ‘the books’, a row of a dozen book-club titles occupying a lowly cell in her wall-unit. I knew what she meant. They were rather scruffy and undisciplined, totally lacking the authentic manufactured look. But she can throw them out now; The Body in Question, like Manwatching, will fit in perfectly among the stainless-steel knick-knacks, the inlaid executive bar and the 26-inch TV screen.
